It has been often said that the poor in the US are not really poor – only in contrast to the rich in the US could that be applied. Using another measurement, more of our "poor" are actually materially richer than the middle class in Europe and far better off than most when compared to world wide conditions. From Heritage (who used US Government data to put these infographics together):
Compare those statistics; certainly not the wide disparity in ownership that I would have expected. So, it is a difference in quantity of material goods or just in quality of them? And compared to the amenities nowadays, many of them did not even exist as I was growing up in my middle class neighborhood.
Some snippets that caught my eye from the Heritage post:
- According to the government’s own survey data, in 2005, the average household defined as poor by the government lived in a house or apartment equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. The family had a car (a third of the poor have two or more cars). For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, a DVD player, and a VCR.
- By its own report, the family was not hungry. The average intake of protein, vitamins, and minerals by poor children is indistinguishable from children in the upper middle class and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms. Poor boys today at ages 18 and 19 are actually taller and heavier than middle-class boys of similar age in the late 1950s and are a full one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than American soldiers who fought in World War II. The major dietary problem facing poor Americans is eating too much, not too little; the majority of poor adults, like most Americans, are overweight
And the most egregious one is this, and was part of the Obamacare legislation:
- President Obama plans to make this situation worse by creating a new “poverty” measure that deliberately severs all connection between “poverty” and actual deprivation. Rector and Sheffield say that the goal is to measure income “inequality,” not poverty—giving the President public relations ammunition for his “spread-the-wealth” agenda.
I can attest to this – when TMEW and I ran our daycare, things were "thin" financially as a lot of personal money was being spent to turnaround what had been a dying business. It made me a bit angry when those who were living on the State would brag about what they were buying and the activities they were participating in even as I and my wife (and sons) were doing without.
Were those folks doing without? Take away the braggadocio, perhaps. But I looked at the bling, at the tats, at the cell phones, and the newer cars, and the game systems, and the clotes….well, you get the picture.
Poor, in the case of our "average poor" statistically is not the picture that some would have us believe (it is not the Grapes of Wrath stereotype).
